Wednesday, November 20, 2013

What if LFR *DID* Require Proving Grounds?

I know the main hubbub is still all about the upcoming expansion Warlords of Draenor. I am somewhat reeling from needing to go 20 man but that's something I can't even deal with until we're 14/14H. I suspect it'll ultimately be better for the game but I'll still miss the feel of 10 man raiding and it'll definitely absolutely stink upsizing.

But that's not the topic today.

The idea of having Proving Grounds interact with LFR was floated a while ago by Ghostcrawler in an interview:

"We’ve even talked about maybe there’s a way that Proving Grounds can
replace item level as the gating mechanism to get you into say raid
finder or similar match making content."

"Yeah, we would never require PGs for LFR. It would just be a way to demonstrate that you didn't need the ilevel."

"It would probably be more like LFR requires ilevel 500 OR a Proving
Ground Silver Medal, or maybe Silver + ilevel 450 or whatever."

But...what if it did require Proving Grounds? And no, I don't mean Gold or even Silver -- I realize that there are hordes of players out there who are really not good at World of Warcraft. But Bronze? Is that too much to ask?

What if we saw something like the following for MoP? You have to fulfill one of the requirements listed for each LFR.

Note that if you could pull off Gold at 440 ilvl when it's tuned for 463 that would be quite a feat.

HoF/ToES LFR
Bronze + 470 ilvl
Silver + 460 ilvl
Gold + 450 ilvl

ToT LFR
Bronze + 480 ilvl
Silver + 470 ilvl
Gold + 460 ilvl

SoO LFR
Bronze + 490 ilvl
Silver + 480 ilvl
Gold + 470 ilvl

Effectively every medal you have past Bronze in LFR shaves off 10 of the required ilvl -- and 10 ilvl is usually something like 15-20% damage/health/healing. This also isn't some colossal time investment -- getting Bronze should only take like 15 minutes and that's counting travel time to the Temple (or wherever Proving Grounds are in the future). It also requires very little skill to get Bronze, but more than going AFK and it shows you understand at least some of the basics.

Now, this is irrelevant for me as I never intend to step foot in LFR again as long as I live -- to use WoD terms, Normal/Heroic all the way for alts (if I have any -- the fact I can help any non-Mythic group with my main severely limits the benefits of having an alt for me, another post about that soon) and the joy of Normal PLUS Heroic PLUS Mythic for my main. But it seems it would be useful as it allows people who have demonstrated they can pull their weight with less gear into LFR and forces people who just don't give a damn to at least do Bronze -- and everyone else in the LFR KNOWS everyone else can at least do Bronze.

Of course, they might simply nerf LFR so far into the ground that it really does become solely a tourist destination with awful ilvl compared to anything else -- or so I hope. Make it clear that people who like raiding absolutely should be stepping up to Normal (current Flex). The long term health of raiding depends on getting new players into the raiding pool.

6 comments:

If nothing else, some sort of PG rating should be a requirement to queue as a tank... that's the one role where one person who doesn't have a clue can absolutely destroy a run. That's also one that should actually check for appropriate equipped gear to queue, my last two SoO LFR runs had a tank with 150K less health than me as a (geared) dps and were in half green items. With free epics available on TI and crafted i476 PvP gear there's no excuse to be doing current tier content in GREENS.

So, PG rating (even Bronze, but I'd prefer Silver which requires some actual skill and not just basic competence) should be a requirement for tanking, IMO.

I support your B/S/G iLvl requirement lowering in general, I know that in lesser gear I definitely won't be the lowest dps in the group and it's not like skilled players would always be queuing in that level of gear, they're going to get upgrades from running. Might make the first month of a new tier more painful, though, which is unfortunately the worst time to run LFR in the first place so it'll make a bad month worse. That's the one downside that I see... but that will only matter if you get a lot of players coming in undergeared due to PG success. Might not be all that common.

I agree that it's (unfortunately) the biggest deal for the tank...but I also think if we're going to force the tank to do it we should force everyone to do it.

The funny thing is that in heroic raids tanking is usually the easiest of the roles (not easy, easiest). The difference between an amazing tank and a truly amazing tank tends to be far less than for healers/DPS.

Yep, agreed, but I'm not sure Blizzard would agree to that. My thinking there is that if the great unwashed want to noob it up in LFR, and if Blizzard believes they should be able to (which I think they do and which I generally mostly agree with), I'd much prefer to have them doing it as dps or healers rather than tanks. If half the dps are crap you're in a typical LFR run, if half the healers are crap you're ahead of the game but if half the tanks are crap you're probably in for a world of hurt unless the other tank can solo the place. That does happen sometimes but... shouldn't have to. If tanks are the biggest shortage right now I'd much prefer they revamp the fights in LFR to be single-tank fights and absolutely put both a PG requirement AND an achievement requirement (must have done the place as dps or healer on any toon) before they can queue as a tank.

Funny you mention that, the majority of my time doing heroic raiding was as a tank and you're right, the heroic mechanics tend not to affect the tanks much at all... things hit you harder but that's a healer issue to deal with (sure, cooldowns, but you'd have used those anyway, right?) and new mechanics are generally ones that dps or healers have to deal with, not tanks. Interesting.

And you're right about that last part, as long as a tank is doing the basics correctly (taunting, not standing in stuff, etc), anything beyond that point, even if it's the tank's fault, can easily look like someone else's fault instead. A tank with 70% effectiveness will look an awful lot like a tank with 90% effectiveness in most cases but you'd notice the delta with a dps or with a healer, especicially if there are assignments that point to specific failures.

"If tanks are the biggest shortage right now I'd much prefer they revamp the fights in LFR to be single-tank fights and absolutely put both a PG requirement AND an achievement requirement (must have done the place as dps or healer on any toon) before they can queue as a tank."

How exactly would the first runs get tanks in such a situation? The only people who could queue as a tank are people who have done the bosses on normal/heroic/mythic and those people are often the LEAST interested in tanking LFR.

"A tank with 70% effectiveness will look an awful lot like a tank with 90% effectiveness in most cases but you'd notice the delta with a dps or with a healer, especicially if there are assignments that point to specific failures."

Precisely. In most cases tanking tends to be pass/fail. Did you taunt the boss at the right time? Did you pick up the right add? Did you position the mob at the right spot? Did you pop a cooldown when it was needed?

The active mitigation stuff has meant small differences in tank skill matter more, but generally speaking anyone tanking heroic (soon to be mythic) content has the basic principles of active mitigation down.

TSW has the Gatekeeper fight serving the role you are talking about for PGs, if I understand you correctly. There's no specific iLvl (QL in TSW), but it is skill-based, and you'd be hard pressed to do it with without at least a few QL10 blues amongst your greens (for reference, QL10.4 purple is the current BiS level). There's also a separate fight for each trinity role: Tanks, Healers, or DPS. In addition, you have to do it solo; no way for friends to help. It took me several hours over a few days and countless tries before I learned the DPS dance well enough to prevail. Healing on a different character took me about 15 minutes and two or three tries, I attribute the relative speed to knowing the dance, though my focus shifted. I still need to do the Tank on my third character, but she's still relatively low. If you're interested, there are plenty of videos of the fight on youtube. Just search for TSW Gatekeeper.

Does the Gatekeeper reduce the strength of your gear if it's above a fairly low point? Proving Grounds do -- it's both skill based and your character power is roughly standardized (plus or minus a few percent).

But yes, PGs are solo and have three different types for tanks/healers/DPS, even medals to get along the way (Bronze is easy, silver is harder, gold gets harder still but still not too bad).

About Me

I play a shadow priest in World of Warcraft and lead Despotism, a two night a week heroic raiding guild on Greymane (despotism.enjin.com).
I can be reached at balkothwarcraft at gmail dot com for any reason.